Word: serb
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When case IT-02-54 is finally heard at the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague this week, it will mark a moment many despaired would never come. The Serb strongman and former President of Yugoslavia who presided over a decade of mass murder and mayhem across the Balkans seemed untouchable for so long, and then became almost forgotten as the world's attention fixed on a new global villain. Yet Slobodan Milosevic will now have to sit each day in a well-lit U.N. courtroom, flanked by two guards, to answer to charges of crimes against humanity--even...
...stage than they acknowledged. He'll claim they acknowledged to him that the region faced a threat of Islamic terrorism. Here he's referring to the fact that more than 1,000 fighters from all over the Arab and Muslim world came to help the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. They called themselves "mujahedeen," and many of them were itinerant veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. Serb leaders at the time described their fight as one against terrorism, and even today pro-Milosevic propagandists use the term "Taliban" to describe their enemies in Bosnia and Kosovo...
...gone to war. In the case of Kosovo, he'll argue that the operations he ordered were legitimate actions by a sovereign state to crack down on Muslim terrorists - meaning the Kosovo Liberation Army. And he'll sound a similar theme on Bosnia, saying that there, too, the local Serbs were fighting a war against foreign Mujahedeen fighters and other terrorists. He'll also probably try to distance himself from the Bosnian war, arguing that he was not responsible for the actions of the Bosnian Serb leadership. But that's a tricky one to sustain, since Milosevic himself signed...
...Kosovo. The province is still legally part of Serbia and Belgrade continues to pay the salaries of northern Mitrovica's civil servants, though elsewhere in Kosovo the U.N. is in charge. Covic hopes to persuade Ivanovic and others to play along with the U.N. in exchange for assurances about Serbs' long-term security. "They have to face reality," Covic says. "The old days are over." One of Covic's proposals is to subsume the bridge watchers into a multi-ethnic U.N.-led police force. But Ivanovic says he would agree to that only if his men got their own operating...
Most longtime residents of Mitrovica insist that what has happened to their home town is the fault of a few extremists and outsiders. "The only thing worse than a Serb at war is a free Albanian," says Beke Abazi, 50, an Albanian magazine editor who is investigating the illegal seizure of property by organized gangs from both sides. "This is not a problem of neighbor-against-neighbor," he insists. "It's criminal gangs who are operating with impunity on both sides. All the good people have gone silent." With Milosevic on trial in the Hague, now may be the time...